By Raffique Shah
Sunday, August 26th 2007
Prime Minister Patrick Manning and his critics seem to be missing the main issue in the heated debate over the Ryder Scott report on our gas reserves. It’s not about how much gas there is, or how much more is waiting to be “discovered”. If some global energy experts are right, Trinidad and Tobago is sitting on possible reserves of 90 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas. And if, over the next ten years, we succeed in adding 25 per cent of that volume to our proved reserves, then Mr Manning’s industrialisation programme will be adequately serviced with its principal feedstock, relatively cheap gas. If they are wrong, if gas runs out in ten years, then we’d be left with a mass of abandoned, rundown plants, much the way Texaco left us holding a skeletal refinery that was on the brink of collapse.
Continue reading The good times will not roll on forever
AUGUSTIN NOEL, head of the Chaguaramas Land Owners’ committee was yesterday arrested after he was caught defacing a concrete pillar in front of the Aluminium Company of America’s facility in Chaguaramas. 
Now that the TT $42.2b 2007-08 budget has been presented to the citizenry of TnT, the casual, albeit non-political observer is only forced to conclude that it was a budgetary exercise in futility on the heels of a general election. 
Comment: Kids say the darnest things!
The Sugar Cane Industry is now proving to be economically viable. But Government will not help the farmers (The Sugar Cane Co-operative) in their current proposals/ collaboration with a French Company because it will show PNM’s foolishness, lack of foresight and politically motivated spite. 
One expected something new and refreshing when Winston Dookeran entered the political area and announced that “new politics” were the order of the day. In his attempt to offer an alternative to the PNM and UNC one felt that there would have been a stricter adherence to decency and truth and that he would have tried to lift the political discourse to a “higher” level. But, as the French says, the more things change, the more they remain the same; the newer the politics, the more repulsive is its contents.
Last week, India and Pakistan marked their 60th anniversary of independence from Britain. Here in Trinidad and Tobago, where more than half the population has roots in the sub-continent that is now divided into three countries (Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, is often forgotten), the occasion went almost unnoticed. India’s High Commissioner held his usual reception, but nobody else seemed interested in this landmark occasion. Curiously, I found myself intrigued by it-not only because of India’s emergence as a potential global power centre, but more so by its history, by what happened during those tumultuous days preceding and following India’s independence.
The government’s intention to develop Laventille though politically tactical is also vitally necessary if the social ills of this area are to be alleviated. Not only does this make economic sense but strategic investments in troubled communities are a sure way to address the social evils which has historically plagued communities where poverty rules supreme. Progressive social thinkers supported by statistics, shows that crime thrives where hope is stifled. Survival has always been the law of the jungle whether literally or metaphorically speaking.